According to most organizations, the biggest drivers to cloud are elasticity and agility.

In other words, it allows you to instantly provision and de-provision resources based on the needs of the business. You no longer have to build the church for Sunday. Once in the cloud, approximately 80% of companies report receiving bills two to three times what they expected. The truth is that while the promise of cloud is that you only pay for what you use, the reality is that you pay for what you provision. The gap between consumption and allocation is what causes the large and unexpected bills.

Cost isn't the only challenge. While most organizations report cost being their biggest problem in managing a public cloud environment, you cannot truly separate performance from cost - the two are tightly coupled. If an organization was optimizing for cost alone, moving all applications to the smallest instance type would be the way to go, but no one is willing to take the performance hit.

In the cloud, more than ever, cost and performance are tied together.

Digital transformation and a rush to the cloud are placing enterprise IT teams under tremendous pressure. While cloud addresses an old pain point - that infrastructure supply is static while application demand is dynamic - matching demand with supply in real-time across multiple metrics and dimensions requires more decisions than any human being can make.

Hybrid cloud estates are unbelievably complex. There are millions of configuration options for EC2 instances alone, AWS has 212 additional products and services and Microsoft lists over 600 Azure services (as of May 2020). This is simply too much complexity for the average IT team to manage and, as a result, many organizations that kicked off digital transformation initiatives with high hopes end up watching innovation grind to a halt while the IT team struggles just to keep the lights on.